What makes Yu Jing special?

Mmmm, this is complicated. A simplification should be saying, we are close to Pano in term of we have a lot of fire power, but at the same time we have less comparedwith them. In return we own some toys that are more from low tech factions.
Yuing has a faction in theory is focus on CC having a lot of hard close combat units. (Shaolins, Ninjas, even our ip has good CC).
But this is a shoting game, out of CC we have good warbands with cheap acces to smoke ( suck it Pano) and orders, with easy smoke combo. Good and funny remotes ( rui shi/ lu dan). Our carries/rambos are good and cool (evan with the most "iconic" ips being like cheap copies of their pano cunterparts). O, and the Su Jian, the king of rambos that need a section for himself and don't have a pano counterpart.

Our da troop the tiger soldier is in my opinion one of the best in game and the models are very very cool.

From the imperial police part you have some unique tricks as adhesive bombs, or being able to start the game with and sniffer deployed to do wierd combos. Worthy warband called kuang shis that you can make explode in truly 40K spirit.

From japanese apart of ninjas you have slme really strong close ranged combat troops, as the shikami or karakuris ( very underated).

And our tags are meeee, not bad but very normal. But at least the models are very cool.


Anyways try the faction, is very funny and the pleasure of killing hi tech enemies (or ariadna's low tech troops) with a hiden ninja on CC is one of the best thinks in game xD


Pd: excuse my bad english

 

Yu Jing is a strong but quite flexible faction. I mainly play Nomads, so my understanding in the superpower is not really deep (much less than those in this forum, at least). But I found very interesting the feeling this faction gave me after countless battles with my main army.

With Yu Jing I feel I'm moving a wall. with tentacles.
I have a lot of though and armored units that can sustain fire. I don't have a fear of LoF, I can play with a more aggressive mindest. Where Nomads (and Haqqislam) are about accurate placements and board control, the core of the Yu Jing can say "fuck it!" and slow moving under a rain of bullets. And oh god, their retailation hurts a lot.
And only then, when their armored core starts engaging, it's the time to surgically strike the enemy. Their camo and/or infiltration units are strong and hard-hitting, ready to wreak havor behind the enemy lines.

So... this is what Yu Jing is to me. In a less romanticized version this faction is a though, hard-hitting bunch of guys, with a very elite section of special troops (that comes with a quite high cost).

 

Yeah, YJ can really do some face smashing. Hsien smoke combo is something you can expect to see in most lists, to take out ARO pieces. Transforming robo cat is an amazing Rambo that is just a ton of fun to play and ram down someone's throat, or flank and carve out the back field. They have a lot of cool unique remotes that carry some cool gadgets and fire power. Heavy infantry pain trains or 5 man links lead by HI can really push out the hurt as well. Infiltrating HI with big guns, yes please!

Lots of cool options.

The spec ops character is pretty cool. Can easily be run solo, or is amazing link defense. I don't like him as much as Leila, but I do like him. Me makes it into most of my lists that can take him.

 

Coming from a PanO player who is going into JSA, one of things that makes Yu Jing unique is that you have the technological prowess like the Eternal Rival against most factions and can be played in a straight forward manner. Except in comparison to PanO, you have a lot more tricks (smoke/MSV 2, good specialist profiles, etc) and have access to really good HIs that are more generalized than PanO (seriously, I wish Aquila and Swiss had some profiles like Hsien or Hac Tao do respectively).

 

Yu Jing gets some pretty unique applications for tech.

-The Dao Fei is a rare, rare unit. A Heavy Infantry that infiltrates with Camouflage.
-Yan Huo: The Hyper Rapid Magnetic Cannon on a Heavy Infantry chassis. Plus dual missile/neurocinetic loadout. This is unique.
-5 point Regular Orders, plus cheap line troops, plus the usual assortment of REMs. Lots of Order fuel for powerful units.
-A blend of warband and high-tech units. Shaolin can charge, smoke, melee, chain rifle... Then your Hsien and Rui Shi can shoot through with an MSV2.
-Close Combat can be part of your game plan, but you don't need to use it. The Kanren is a good example of this ethos; you can do a lot just maneuvering and firing with Holoprojector Level 2, but if someone gives you the opportunity, that Monofilament attack can do a lot more damage than a Combi Rifle or shotgun.
-Internal discontent. Lobotomized political prisoners! Second class citizens sacrificed as cannon fodder! The Secret Police! Yu Jing's nice and unapologetic from a fluff perspective.

 

From what I remember we've had the conversation about this on the old forums. One notable opinion was that Yu Jing is basically the real "blue" faction of Infinity, the Jack-of-All-Trades. It does everything well, has a full range of good units - from TAGs to Warbands - and no glaring weaknesses. All other factions are bent at least some in one direction or another.

 

Yu Jing has a few tricks and toys that makes them stand out and above other factions.
There ability to deploy or push up the board is amazing.
We have Infiltrating TO Ninjas and Super Ninjas. Infiltrating heavy infantry, and maybe the best drop troop in the game with the Tiger.
However perhaps the most interesting unique aspect about Yu Jing are the warbands.
5 point troops with bombs strapped to them and chain rifles autohit if you are in range and assuming you don't dodge. This would not be awful as an irregular unit, that fact it is regular and acts as pure fuel for your very good heavy infantry or your micro tag is crazy.
And speaking of micro-tag ...
The Su-jian cat transformer thing is pretty sick. This things mobility is nuts. able to perform an 8 inch cautious move and having effectively 3 wounds makes it immune to most ARO units. This unit is in your opponents face killing there important units with few ways to slow it down.

Yu Jing feels like the fanfiction Mary Sue faction. It has most of the tricks and cool units of the other factions but with slight twists to them.

 

For me it's a few things:

1) Dirt cheap Heavy Infantry. We have plenty of decent HI in the 30 point range. Zuyong, Wu Ming, and Haramaki are all in the sweet spot. JSA can run a full HI link for like 130 points. This means we have very cheap wounds compared to someone like PanO, though it's not quite as good cost-wise as Tohaa.

2) CC specialists. Most of our higher cost units are at least CC capable, and many have Martial Arts (and that means stealth!). This makes us much more resilient against warbands who just want to run at us. YJ has the only MA5 unit that isn't a mercenary (Shinobu) and is the only faction with a non-character with MA4 (Oniwaban).

3) Cool G:Remote Presence units. YJ has two different HI with remote presence, the Su-Jian and the Karakuri Project. Our combat remotes are also pretty cool (the Rui Shi and Lu Duan). I don't think there are many other HI with Remote Presence, and it's awesome because it means they get a lot of the advantages of remote presence (2 levels of unconsciousness, for example) but don't have some of the disadvantages of most remotes (not being able to go prone, dodge penalties).

4) Speaking of which, ISS has the highest AVA of Holoprojector Lv2 units. Sforza, Kanren (AVA3) and the Lu Duan (AVA2) all have it.

5) Probably the biggest one, we have really flexible profiles. Compare a Swiss Guard to a Hac Tao, for example. They have the same statline except the Hac Tao has +4CC, +1WIP and -1BS. They're both TO:Camo. But the Hac Tao comes with Kinematica and a Nanopulser, and has 8 loadouts compared to the Swiss Guard's 4. There are 5 Locust profiles compared to the Guilang's 7. The Zuyong can't even Fireteam:Core yet and he has 11 loadouts (I can't find any other HI that have 11, though a couple of factions have one with 10 like Morat Suryats or Nomad Mobile Brigadas.)

 

Leila brought more to the table simply by being a Ghulam and Muyib at the same time, particularly for Hassassin Barahm. Unlike HB, ISS were already more than capable of fielding a 5-man Celestial Guard link and unlike Haqq and Leila, Yu Jing aren't capable of spreading a repeater net to complement the strengths of the new character's KHD.

That said, Xi does an excellent job at protecting the integrity of a CG link - though I note that if you're using CG to fuel Cranes, it tends to be the Crane that's the point of the link and the integrity of the link matters less if the Crane dies - and the Mad Traps I have found to be absolutely fantastic at protecting a CG+Crane link from mines.
When I remember that the Mad Traps exist. Bye bye, Rui Shi, I didn't treat you well.

End verdict; solid, but not exceptional. Bring him if you bring a CG link, but it's less common to bring CG links in ISS.

I'd like to contest this assertion. Mary Sue characters' defining trait is that they can do everything better or too well. I'd say that Yu Jing is more Jack Of All Trades - they can do nearly everything, but they're not good at any of it except maybe Martial Arts - in short, they excel at being ham-fisted which isn't something that characterises Mary Sues. If you want Mary Sue in Infinity, I'd point at Haqq (low-tech-my-ass), Nomads (limited-resources-my-ass) or Combined (explicitly designed to be best at everything).

 

Xi Zhuang is fantastic

 

I agree. Last time I used Xi he took down a Wildcat hacker who had my Shikami pinned down and Carlotta Kowalski. Time before that he knocked two structure off of a Tik and the deployed madtraps kept doing there job after he died. Time before that he held up Wallace and his Wulver buddies for half my opponents turn before getting eaten.

 

What is a “blue” faction?

Is this a magic the gathering reference?

 

No, it's about the fact that in many games the default/basic/beginner/jack-of-all-trades faction is blue. Starcraft Terrans, Warcraft Humans, Warmachine Cygnar, etc. In Infinity it's PanO, but PanO is actually more specialized.

 

PanO shoots things. They're very good at shooting things, but that's really about all they do. Any given model is going to be the best or nearly the best in the game at that niche. But don't ask it to do anything outside that niche.

Yu Jing aren't quite as good as PanO at any one thing, but most of their models have a backup plan they can work with. For a lot of YJ models, the backup plan is "shank you very much". Especially if you're talking Japanese troops. CC23 plus Martial Arts L3 and maybe even Berserk, so you crit on 8s is just evil. Yeah. You can get a +12 to your CC roll with a -3 to their roll, so someone who is CC16 base can only hit you because you made that attack a Normal Roll...

YJ has all the awesome HI. We have a camo+infiltrating HI, we have TO camo HI, we have HI with unholy CC stats, we have HI that pack TAG-scale weapons, and we even have HI with an 8-2 MOV and Climbing Plus!

 

Vanilla YJ doesn't stand out at first glance, they're pretty much the most balanced faction with a slight edge towards CC.
They're the Faction that gets cheap Warbands next to TO Camo HI. You can count the things YJ doesn't get on pretty much one hand, extremely high spec stuff like MSV3 or BS15 and stuff unique to specific factions. YJ troops neither lack access to Skills, Stats, choices nor equipment. If there is a specific weakness, it's probably that they are below average in the Reactive Turn.

YJ has the best CC values in the game (as the only faction with MA5 and CC25), but you won't have trouble building a list that never wants to be anywhere near a CC either. YJ also tends to trade an extra edge for their main purpose for additional tools or Skills. Where PanO's Swiss Guard has BS15, the Hac Tao has a Nanopulser, DA CCW, extra WIP+CC and 4 extra Profiles including a KHD.

As a Faction YJ is the epitome of comfort. You want blunt? You get blunt. You want Infiltrators and Holo Senanigans? You get Infiltrators and Holo Shenanigans. You want a mix of everything? Sure no problem.
However what this doesn't mean is that the faction lacks character in any way. There are plenty things unique to YJ (Karakuri, Kuang Shi, CC TO Infiltrators, Su-Jian etc) but none of these means giving something up for it. The endless combination of things to combine is what makes YJ stand out. Other factions end up with a couple of obvious best choices for Specialist duty or killing and build a list around that, YJ usually has double or triple the amount of choices available and pretty much never has to run a subpar choice for the lack of an alternative. Any other faction will make you work around several weaknesses where YJ simply doesn't have such a thing.

If that doesn't sound interesting enough there are always the Sectorials to look at. ISS is still very easy to handle as far as Sectorials go. JSA isn't weak either, but a very crass departure from ISS and Vanilla.

 

"Heavy infantry! Come on in, HI lovers! At the JSA we're slashing other HI in half! This is an HI blowout! We got orange HI, black HI, Chinese HI, Japanese HI, camo HI, infiltrating HI, hidden HI, S5 HI, cheap HI, sexbot HI, cat HI, bird HI, martial-arts HI, police HI, convict HI, Strategos HI, HI with TAG-grade weaponry, flying jumping magical gun ninja HI, chain rifle HI, drone HI, fake HI! If we don't have it, you don't want it!"

 

Made my day :-)